ark-lang/docs

Documentation for the Ark language

Ark Documentation

This is the documentation for the Ark programming language.

Where do I start?

There are a few folders that cover different aspects of the laguage. Here's a breakdown:

• intro - An introduction to the Ark language. If you are looking for a brief overview of the language, and how to get started, this is for you.
• spec - Covers every detail of the language, this is technical documentation for the nerds. You can use it for a reference if you need to know about how something behaves, or if you need to know about an obscure feature, etc.
• guides - A collection of useful guides, these will help you write idiomatic Ark, and are there to ease you into concepts that may seem foreign.
• meta - Additional notes on the compiler itself. Anything that doesn't fall under the categories above, will likely end up here.

How to Contribute?

Check the CONTRIBUTING.md file. This contains various information you need to know to help contribute to Arks documentation.

License

Licensed under MIT 2016

docs's Issues

Some Type system improvements

Type inference

At the moment, type inference prefers doubles always rather than floats (for a decent reason). However, perhaps a better system would be to offer an explicit literal for floats so that a user can still force a float with type inference. In many C-family languages, this is accomplished by adding a f to the end of the would-otherwise-be-double literal:

1.2 ← double
1.2f ← float

Naming convention

At the moment, you have opted for {i,u}{8,16,32,64,128}. I would recommend you replace the i with s (for signed). If we are to be explicit, we might as well be as explicit as possible.

Arbitrarily-Sized, Fixed-width Integers

Perhaps one of the coolest features of LLVM, in my humble opinion, is that integer arithmetic is well-defined for integers of any bitwidth. And, that arbitrarily-sized fixed-width integers are openly exposed. So, for example, in LLVM IR, you could write the following:

%var = alloca i9
store i9 511, i9* %var

It would work! %var is a nine-bit integer! Admittedly, these fancypants integers are generally converted to system-native types during the compilation process, but it does allow for more specific compile-time type-checking. Since these are exposed in LLVM IR itself, inclusion of them into the language would not necessarily be so difficult (on the condition that it only works in the LLVM backend).

Update modules docs (dir based now)

Methods/func recievers

More on this + static methods and call by value/ptr...

Remove ownership stuff

Operator overloading

Update array docs

SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN book.ark-lang.org

Update everything!

Loads of outdated stuff in here, a bit of it I have updated. If you do update anything in the documentation, please update the links in the table of contents, as well as add the id tag to the section title. The typical format for id's is the title name, remove all the punctuation, convert to lower case, change spaces to hyphens and you're good to go.

There's a lot of outdated stuff in here, and some stuff may be inaccurate or need updating.

@ark-lang/owners

Add Travis CI auto-push on successful build to ark-lang/book.ark-lang.org.

To ensure that all PRs to this repo are automagically built and pushed to the live website, I would suggest utilising Travis CI's custom deployment options. Then, having the documentation be built would be merely a matter of pushing any source edits to this repo.

automagically build the gitbook on the book.ark-lang.org repo

new dereference symbol @

initializing structures

uintptr

memory allocation